Zmolek offers the first in-depth study of the evolution of English manufacturing from the feudal and early modern periods within the context of the development of agrarian capitalism. With an emphasis on the relationship between Parliament and working Britons, this work challenges readers to 'rethink' the perception of the role of the state in the first industrial revolution as passive.

In 1980 Polish workers astonished the world by winning an independent union with the right to strike deep inside the Eastern Bloc. Seeing Through the Eyes of the Polish Revolution uses 150 interviews with this struggle's leaders, their supporters, and their opponents to adroitly shows how an opposition was built and eventually forced the Stalinist government from power.

In this insightful work Wade Matthews considers the views of Britain's major New Left thinkers--E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Perry Anderson, Stuart Hall, and Tom Nairn --on various 'national questions'. From decolonization to the nationalist implications of Thatcherism, this work charts the continuities and fissures between various New Left perspectives and what has been called 'the break-up of Britain.'

In the Vale of Tears brings to a culmination the project for a renewed and enlivened debate over the interaction between Marxism and religion. It does so by offering the author's own response to that tradition. It simultaneously draws upon the rich insights of a significant number of Western Marxists and strikes out on its own. Thus, it argues for the crucial role of political myth on the Left; explores the political ambivalence at the heart of Christianity; challenges the bent among many on the Left to favour the unexpected rupture of kairos as a key to revolution; is highly...

Capitalism has proven much more resilient than Marx anticipated, and the working class has, until now, hardly lived up to his hopes. The Marxian concept of class rests on exclusion. Only the 'pure' doubly-free wage-workers are able to create value; from a strategic perspective, all other parts of the world's working populations are secondary. But global labour history suggests, that slaves and other unfree workers are an essential component of the capitalist economy. What might a critique of the political economy of labour look like that critically reviews the experiences of the past five...

In addition to his role as Evo Morales's vice-president, Alvaro Garcia Linera is one of Bolivia's foremost intellectuals. With a theoretical trajectory beginning in efforts to combine Marxism and Indianism, then developed in reaction to the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and in contact with the mass social movements of recent years, Garcia Linera's Plebeian Power can be read as both an evolving analysis of Bolivian reality through periods of great social change, and as an intellectual biography of the author himself. Informed by such thinkers as Marx, Bourdieu and Rene Zavaleta, Garcia...

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) is one of the most translated Italian authors of all time. After the Second World War his thought became increasingly influential, and remained relevant throughout the second half of the century. Today, it is generally agreed that his Marxism has highly original and personal features, as confirmed by the fact that his international influence has continued to grow since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gramsci and Languages offers an explanation of this originality and traces the origins of certain specific features of...

This book demonstrates that the basic concepts of the three volumes of Capital come under different categories of time: "time of production" in the first volume is linear, "time of circulation" in the second is circular, while in the third volume "organic time" is the unity of the two. Capitalist relations emerge as a definite organisation of social time that obeys its own intrinsic criteria and operates as an autonomous, social subject. Reading Capital from this perspective, it becomes possible to restore its dialectical (Hegelian) logic - not in order to reveal the "real"...

In Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism Levant and Oittinen provide a window into the subterranean tradition of 'creative' Soviet Marxism, which developed on the margins of the Soviet academe and remains largely outside the orbit of contemporary theory in the West. With his 'activity approach', E.V. Ilyenkov, its principal figure in the post-Stalin period, makes a substantial contribution toward an anti-reductionist Marxist theory of the subject, which should be of interest to contemporary theorists who seek to avoid economic and cultural reductionism as...

Antonio Gramsci was not only one of the most original and significant communist leaders of his time but also a creative thinker whose contributions to the renewal of Marxism remain pertinent today. In The Revolutionary Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, Frank Rosengarten explores Gramsci's writings in areas as diverse as Marxist theory, the responsibilities of political leadership, and the theory and practice of literary criticism. He also discusses Gramsci's influence on the post-colonial world. Through close readings of texts ranging from Gramsci's socialist journalism in the Turin years to...